Just as the thousands of pro-life grassroots activists arrived in DC – who are by the way among the Republican Party’s most stalwart grassroots supporters and workers guess what the House Republican leadership did?

They pulled from consideration a pro-life bill that many newly elected Republican members of Congress campaigned on and promised to vote for when, not if, it came to the floor.

The bill, the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, was drafted to protect children who were capable of feeling pain from being aborted.

That bill, that many Republicans had campaigned on, will be replaced by the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, a bipartisan bill that passed the House last year and will get another vote today, the 42nd anniversary of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision.

According to the National Journal, the change came after House Republican women and moderates raised objections with GOP leaders on the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.

National Journal and other establishment media outlets take this as “exhibiting the deepening rift between centrists and conservatives who are at cross-purposes on which issues the party should be highlighting.”

We disagree; we see the major part of this as a failure of Republican leaders to handle bills in regular order.

If “House Republican women and moderates” had objections, let them be aired and voted on in committee and on the House floor, then legitimate areas of dispute, such as whether or not an alleged rape must have been reported to waive the requirements of the Act could be settled according to democratic principles and everyone would know where Members of the House stand on the issue.

But that’s not what GOP leaders want because they know that the vast majority of Americans, including many Democrats, oppose abortion under most circumstances. And they especially oppose it when the child can feel pain and live outside the womb.

According to National Journal, public polls show that many Americans are on the pro-life side of the underlying issue in the bill. A majority of women say that abortions should be restricted after the 20th week of pregnancy.

"The polls even among women are very clear on this," Rep. Vicky Hartzler told National Journal reporters Daniel Newhauser and Lauren Fox. "People understand it is not right to dismember a baby in the womb once it feels pain."

The problem for establishment Republicans is most of them want to go back home and campaign as pro-lifers, even though they are not willing to translate the moral basis of the pro-life movement into legislation.

And if they actually took an open vote on the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, then it would most likely generate a massive outpouring of grassroots support for the bill and a pro-life primary opponent for any Republican who voted against it.

So, the GOP establishment leaders let anti-conservatives like Rep. Renee Ellmers (NC-2) derail legislation that is, according to most objective measures, supported by the vast majority of the Republican Party’s grassroots base – and what’s more – is the morally correct thing to do.

As CHQ Chairman Richard A. Viguerie wrote in his latest book TAKEOVER[13] and later told radio host Mark Levin, for over 100 years conservatives have had their political guns pointed in the wrong direction.

“We’ve been focused on defeating the liberal, Big Government Democrats, when the first, and most important, roadblock to our goal of governing America according to conservative principles is the progressive, Big Government Republicans,” said Viguerie. “We’ve been focused on Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barack Obama when Eric Cantor, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and other Big Government Republicans are the problem.”

What more is it going to take for grassroots conservatives to understand that the GOP establishment is the enemy of government according to conservative principles and we must work tirelessly to defeat them in 2016?